The Sour Lemon Score p-12

by Richard Stark

  Parker got to his feet and ran for a corner of the house. There were no more shots. He moved quickly down the side of the house, but then he heard a car door slam somewhere out front. He ran and got to the front of the house in time to see a pale blue Chevy disappearing away to the right. Uhl’s car.

  He could hear the woman still screaming. Go back there? No, she wasn’t going to know anything, and a hysterical woman could be several kinds of unexpected trouble.

  Parker knew what had happened; he could see the whole thing clear and entire. Pearson had told him about having second thoughts after refusing to tell Grace Weiss how to get in touch with Uhl. So he’d done something about the second thoughts, but instead of calling Grace back he’d gone directly to Uhl.

  Uhl must have had a bad minute there when Pearson called him and told him Benny Weiss wanted to see him. But then Uhl had to have worked it out and realized it meant Parker was after him. And he’d almost settled for Parker at the same time.

  Where would Uhl go now? Pearson hadn’t gotten around to telling Parker how to find Uhl, but Uhl couldn’t know that or take a chance on it. So now he’d dig a hole someplace and climb in and pull the dirt in after him. Now he was going to be twice as tough to find.

  And Parker had only one name and address left. Joyce Langer, 154 West 87th Street, New York City.

  Pearson’s wife was still screaming. Parker got into his drove away from there.

  car and Nine The girl who opened the door to Parker’s knock had the aggrieved look of the born loser. Without it, she would have been good-looking. A willowy girl with long chestnut hair streaming down her back in the manner of urban folk singers, she had good brown eyes and a delicately boned face, but the hangdog expression destroyed her shot at beauty. You looked at her and you knew right away her voice would be a whine.

  It was. She said, “What is it? I’m having dinner.”

  It was eight o’clock, a little late for dinner if she was by herself, and from her clothing Parker guessed she was by herself. She was in wrinkled dark blue bell-bottom slacks, rope-sole sandals, and a gray sweatshirt with a cartoon character’s face on it.

  Parker said, “I want to talk to you about George Uhl.”

  Her face hardened, the complainer lines deepening in her forehead and around her mouth. “I haven’t seen George for over a year,” she said. “Try somewhere else.”

  “Where?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said, and started to close the door.

  Parker stuck his foot in the entrance. “Just a minute,” he said.

  She looked at the foot as though she couldn’t believe it, and when she looked back up at Parker her complainer’s face was on her so strong she looked as though she had a toothache. She said, “What do you think you’re doing?” And the whine had gone up an octave.

  “You don’t like George Uhl,” he said.

  “What does it matter to you who I like? Do you want me to call for help?”

  “I don’t like George either,” Parker said. “If I find him, I’ll cause him some trouble.”

  She looked at him appraisingly. “You will?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is this? You a jealous husband or something?”

  “Something.”

  She looked past Parker at the hall, frowning, and then half turned to look at the apartment behind her. “I was just having dinner … .”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “The apartment’s a sight.”

  “I couldn’t care less,” he said.

  She looked at him again. “You’re really mad at George?”

  “Yes.”

  She hesitated a second longer, then shrugged and pulled the door all the way open, saying, “Okay, come on in.” Even that was said as though a heavy weight had just been put on her.

  Parker walked into a sloppy living room, with a TV dinner on the coffee table and the television on with the sound turned low. He stood there and she shut the door after him, saying, “I don’t like fuss when it’s just me. You know how it is.” She was embarrassed about herself, though Parker didn’t care, and her embarrassment wouldn’t make her change anything.

  “I know how it is,” Parker agreed.

  She came around him, looking forlornly at her dinner. “It’s probably cold anyway. Listen — uh. What did you say your name was?”

  “Tom Lynch.”

  “Hi, Tom. I’m Joyce Langer.” It looked for a second as though she would even offer to shake hands with him.

  “I know,” he said.

  “Listen,” she said, trying to be animated. “Have you had dinner?”

  Parker had driven straight up from Alexandria with stops only for gas. Four hours ago he’d had some of Lew Pearson’s gin and tonic, but nothing since. He said, “No, I haven’t.”

  “Then why don’t you take me? I know a pretty nice little Mexican place down on Seventy-ninth Street. Okay?”

  Parker was feeling the sense of urgency more than ever now. The people he was talking to were spread out up and down the eastern seaboard; he was wasting most of his time driving from one city to another. In the meantime Uhl could be anywhere. And Rosenstein could still be ahead of him.

  But Joyce Langer could close up on him at any second, and he knew it. She was an injustice collector, a whiner, a stubborn, ineffectual hater. She might not be able to tell him a damn thing, but he would have to keep her happy until he found out one way or the other, so he said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

  “Just let me change,” she said, and in her animation she almost did look pretty, the complainer lines fading though not entirely disappearing. “I won’t be a sec,” she said.

  Parker knew that meant ten minutes, maybe fifteen. “All right,” he said.

  “You could watch television — that’s a pretty good show on there right now. A special about the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. You want me to turn it up?”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Let me just get rid of … .” Her words trailed off as she picked up the TV dinner and hurried with it from the room.

  Parker sat where his eyes would be attracted to the television set, but he didn’t turn the sound up. The movement on the screen — Girders lifting, men in work helmets looking up and moving their arms — distracted him slightly, and for the rest he just made himself be patient.

  He knew too little about Uhl, that was the problem. Too little about Uhl and too little about the people around him. He had to poke around blind in Uhl’s life, never knowing what the reaction would be. With Rosenstein he’d succeeded only in setting another wolf on the scent. Pearson would have been good, because he had a sexual complaint against Uhl, but all that time spent driving down to Alexandria had played to Uhl’s advantage, and now Parker was back almost to the beginning again. The last link to Uhl’s life, a discarded girl friend. With Uhl spooked and Rosenstein prowling around somewhere.

  The point was, thirty-three thousand dollars wasn’t enough to drive Uhl out of his life. He hadn’t planned, obviously, on taking the thirty-three grand and going to Europe or Canada or South America with it. It wasn’t enough. He’d counted on getting rid of all his partners in the robbery, and then he could go back into his normal life with four times his share and nobody to notice anything or ask him anything. Parker’s being alive had spoiled things for him, but he still couldn’t just abandon his life. He didn’t have enough money for it. If Parker — or Rosenstein — spooked him enough he might finally take off just out of desperation, hoping to start up somewhere else again with the thirty-three thousand as a stake. But what Uhl was going to want to do was hang around the general area, out of sight, until it had all blown over, until Parker and Rosenstein had given up and gone on to other things. And in the meantime Uhl would want to maintain some sort of contact with his regular life to know what was happening, if for no other reason.

  Pearson was proof of that. There’d been someone, some individual person, that Pearson could call and get to deliver a message to Uhl
. That someone, or maybe a different someone now, could lead Parker to Uhl. All he needed was to be led to the someone.

  Which meant he had to get into Uhl’s life, had to make contact with the people Uhl knew. And all he had left to help him was one old girl friend with a hate against Uhl and a complaint against the world.

  She was back in ten minutes, and she’d tried her best. She was in a yellow sleeveless miniskirted dress with orange Mondrian lines, her shoes were casual flats in a matching orange, and she carried a small orange handbag. She’d brushed her hair and made up her face and even put on eyelashes. The whiner was well disguised now; if you didn’t look close, you might miss her.

  Except for the voice. “There!” she said. “That didn’t take long, did it?” Even through the animation the petulant overtones remained.

  “Not long,” Parker said.

  She switched off the television set, and they left the apartment. They were on 87th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus, and she led the way over to Amsterdam and then south.

  Parker tried once or twice to get her to talk about Uhl as they walked along, but she wouldn’t do it. “Not on an empty stomach,” she said, and made stupid conversation about the weather instead. “Isn’t this weather something? Boy! Different every day. What about that rainstorm yesterday? Wasn’t that something?”

  “Yes,” Parker said. He was thinking that a lot of time had gone by and he hadn’t gotten anywhere. They’d knocked over the bank on Monday, and it was Thursday before he’d gotten to Brock, the day it rained. Now it was Friday. Four days of running back and forth, and Uhl was still out there someplace, sitting on the money.

  The restaurant had an aquarium decorating scheme — fish and fishnets, candles flickering on the tables. They ate Mexican food, cooling their mouths with beer, and afterwards over coffee Parker said, “Now we talk about George Uhl.”

  “Do you have a match?”

  He held a light for her, and she cupped her hand around his while she lit her cigarette. “Mm, thank you.” She smiled at him through smoke and candlelight. “You have strong hands. And a one-track mind. George is all you’re interested in, isn’t he?”

  “For now,” Parker said because he thought he ought to play her game with her just a little. He didn’t want her to freeze.

  “I don’t know what you have against George,” she said, looking down at the ashtray as she flicked no ashes from her cigarette, “But I have plenty.”

  “I won’t pry into your personal life,” Parker told her, short-circuiting a long, sad story. “All I want is to find out where he is.”

  She looked at him and frowned a little. She was being coquettish now, even frowning coquettishly, and with that and the dimness of the candlelight and the cigarette smoke the whiner was almost completely out of sight. Except for the voice. “I haven’t seen him for a year,” she said. “I honestly haven’t. More than a year.”

  “You used to know him,” Parker said.

  “Didn’t I, though,” she said, twisting her mouth scornfully.

  “So you knew the people he knew. You knew his friends.”

  “A man like George,” she said, “doesn’t have friends. Just people he uses.”

  “That could be. But some people think they’re his friends. Everybody has somebody who thinks he’s his friend.”

  She shrugged, flicking ashes again. “I suppose so.”

  “They’re the ones who’ll know where he is. But I don’t know yet who they are.”

  She looked at him abruptly with something very pained behind her eyes. “How did you hear about me?”

  “From a woman named Grace Weiss.”

  The name obviously meant nothing to her. She said, “Who on earth is she?”

  “The wife of a guy George knew.”

  “How did she know anything about me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The complainer crept a little more into the open. “I don’t like the idea of people talking about me. People I don’t even know.”

  “She told me you used to know George. That’s all she said. And if you used to know him, you know some of his friends.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Who would they be?” Parker asked her.

  She would have liked to dwell on the injustice of strangers talking about her, but she came around reluctantly to consider Parker’s question. She said, “It’s been a while. George and I never really were that close anyway. He just used me, the way he uses everybody. He doesn’t let anybody get close to him, not really close.”

  She wouldn’t stay on the track. Parker nudged her back on, saying, “But you had to know some of the other people he knew.”

  “Well, there was Howie; that’s one.”

  “Howie. You know his last name?”

  “Something Italian. Let me think. It was like coffee, you know, the instant coffee? What is it, espresso. Progressi, that was his name! Howie Progressi.”

  “Where’s he live?”

  “Oh, somewhere in Brooklyn. He has a garage down there. He and George are both car nuts. Howie enters those demolition derby things out on the Island. You know the kind of thing?”

  “No. Demolition derby?”

  “A lot of crazy guys get into beat-up cars,” she said, “and they all go out in the middle and bump into each other. It’s supposed to be a gas, but frankly I never saw that much in it. I went with George a couple of times, and it was just creepy. Everybody in the stands screaming and yelling and cheering, and these crazy guys out there in the middle of the track bumping into each other. And the last car still moving is the winner. Is that creepy? And they talk about they wonder if this country’s violent. Wow.”

  “And Howie Progressi drives in these things?”

  “All the time. He never wins or anything, but he doesn’t even want to win, if you ask me. He’s just there to bump into other cars. He and George were buddies for a while. I don’t know if they are still.”

  “And you don’t know his address?”

  “Just somewhere in Brooklyn.” She shrugged. “I suppose he’s in the phone book.”

  “All right. Who else?”

  “There was somebody named Barry he used to see sometimes. I never met him, and then he moved to Washington or someplace.”

  Washington? Near Alexandria. Uhl had been close enough to get to Pearson within a couple of hours, depending on what time Pearson had his change of heart and contacted Uhl. Parker said, “Who is this Barry?”

  “I don’t know. That’s all I ever heard was Barry. No last name or anything. I remember him and Howie talking about this Barry together one time and giggling like crazy. Because they had a secret, you know. They knew Barry and I didn’t. That was supposed to be funny.”

  “Howie knows Barry, though, is that right?”

  “Sure. They had a lot of fun over that one.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “There was a cop,” she said. “I never met him either, but George saw him sometimes. They had something going on. I don’t know what.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Dumpke, or Drumpke. Dugald?” She frowned, rubbing the lines in her forehead with one finger. “Dumek!” she cried. “That’s it, Dumek!” She spelled it.

  “What’s his first name?”

  “I don’t know. George always just called him Officer Dumek. He’d say, ‘I’ve got to go see Officer Dumek.’ Wait, I did see him one time. We went to the movies, up to the New Yorker, you know? On Broadway? And we were walking back and there was a police car stopped by a fire hydrant and there was nobody behind the wheel, but there was a policeman on the right side, sitting there with his arm out the window, and when we went by he waved and said, ‘Hi, George.’ And George said hi back, but I forget what name he said. But then he told me that was Officer Dumek. But I couldn’t describe him or anything. He was just a policeman in a police car at night. You know?”

  Parker nodded. “Okay. Anybody else?”

  “Nope.” She shook her
head, being totally positive.

  “Maybe somebody you haven’t thought of?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I’m pretty sure not.”

  Parker gave it up. He said, “If he was in trouble, do you think he’d come to you?”

  “Oh, I wish he would,” she said savagely.

  “Yeah, but would he?”

  “I don’t know. He’s so damn arrogant, I suppose he might. If he didn’t have anybody else to turn to, maybe he would. Think he could just walk back in and take over again.” The whine was as sharp as vinegar now, the lines in her forehead looking like pencil strokes, crayon stokes, in the candlelight. Then she leaned forward and said, “You’re really mad at him, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’d really beat him up, wouldn’t you?”

  It was what she wanted to hear, so he said, “Yes.”

  “I tell you what,” she said, her voice dropping, becoming more confidential. “If I hear from George at all, I’ll call you. Okay?”

  Parker considered the offer. Was there anything else under it? No, he didn’t thing so. He said, “All right. That’d be good.”

  “And if I think of anybody else, anything else that might help you, I’ll call. Like Officer Dumek’s first name, or anything like that.”

  “Good. You can reach me at the Rilington Hotel, in midtown. You know of it?”

  “Rilington Hotel. I can look it up in the phone book.”

  “Right. I’m in and out of there, so if I’m not registered when you call, just tell them to hold the message for me.”

  She nodded. “You’re from out of town, then, is that it?”

  “I’m in New York a lot of the time,” he told her to keep her interest alive.

  It did. “Then maybe we can get to know each other a little,” she said. “I could show you around the city some, if you don’t know it very well.”

  “After I find George,” he said.

  “A one-track mind,” she said, smiling. “I told you that’s what you had.”

  “That’s what I have.”

  She looked off toward the fishnets on the wall. “I wonder where George is,” she said.